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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

> Also, they don't have a sales force like Amazon. A bunch of non-engineer humans who do nothing but convince other people to buy their product.

Here's the catch, the "bunch of non-engineer humans" as you called them are not stupid though. All around these people are watching the landscape and market. They are aware that GCP has a superior pricing structure and can be up to 50% cheaper[1]. Therefore my theory is that GCP can continue to offer lower prices, greater governance, superior performance, and solid support, and their (sales+engineering) force can be in-bound driven instead of out-bound like AWS.

[1] - https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/18/google-cloud-is-50-cheaper-...

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That's not how enterprise sales cycles work though. They don't call you, you call them. Even when they want the hot new thing, they shoot an email off and say, "please have a salesperson here to make a presentation on why we should switch to you".

And at the moment, AWS has them beat hands down on governance. It's one area where GCP still needs to play catch up, and it's really important for enterprises. I'm sure they'll get there, but they aren't there yet.

"The numbers given in this article do not account for any AWS reservation. However, they all account for Google sustained use discount (30% automatic discount on instances that ran for the entire month)."

I'll never understand why people keep referencing that 50% cheaper article. They take into account the 30% monthly discount from Google, but ignore the 47% discount I currently get from Amazon by reserving my instances for a year. Why? Well, because the author thinks "Reserved Instances are bullshit!".

Now, I agree reserved instances are not ideal, but if you're trying to write an article about pricing, it's absurd to exclude such a discount. It's obvious the author was just going for click-bait.

Why? RI's require upfront purchasing, sustained use doesn't. So the comparison is valid because it's comparing on-demand instances from both providers, and Google comes out cheaper.

Otherwise you can say anything has better pricing because you signed a big volume discount upfront, whether you're buying cloud VMs or tires.

AWS RIs don't require upfront purchasing (payment). They offer full-upfront; they offer half-upfront; they also offer no-upfront.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricin...

Yes, but it's still upfront purchasing. You don't have to pay immediately but you have to commit to the full term to get the discount, with an option to get more of a discount if you pay early too.

Google's sustained-use discounts have no commitments at all.

Google has released "Committed Use Discounts", an RI competitor, which appears to be ~35% cheaper than RIs on average, according to Rightscale [0].

I also wrote an article discussing why "Committed Use Discounts" is a much bigger deal than just a "price model" at [1].

It'd be great for "thefht" guy to do the comparison, but data's already out there.

(work at Google Cloud)

[0] http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-analysis/aws-reser...

[1] https://hackernoon.com/why-googles-answer-to-aws-reseved-ins...

That 47% discount is a discount on AWS on demand (EC2/RDS) prices - not a 47% discount relative to GCP sustained use pricing.

I just finished researching pricing on AWS/GCP for my team - and I found that generally AWS matches GCP pricing (sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower) if you can commit to 1 year.

From what I found through my research, the only way to achieve a significant reduction in price relative to GCP is if you can commit to 3 years on AWS.

However, I found it somewhat difficult to compare apples to apples - as it can be difficult to match CPU and RAM - I had to settle for close enough. There is a very big difference in network bandwidth allowances per type - with GCP being far more generous. Load balancing offerings differ greatly - with GCP seeming much more modern in design (HA, geo-load balancing, anycast static ip, etc.). My point here being that our analysis took into account price as well as other factors.

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